


Part One: Danielle

by HellishMinds



Series: You Have To Love All Of Us [1]
Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Boarding School isn't fun, Clone Illness, Delphine's been shot by Beardy McBeardface, F/F, Flashbacks are fun!, Homophobia, Referenced suicide, The backstory we've all been waiting for, This isn't happy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-10
Updated: 2017-04-10
Packaged: 2018-10-17 05:56:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10587840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HellishMinds/pseuds/HellishMinds
Summary: History Yet to Be Written (s3, ep 10): "What will happen to her?". Delphine has known many hers in her life. Cosima did not need to ask her to love all of them, she already had.As she dies, Delphine remembers.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Here's my first ever contribution to the Orphan Black fandom! I've been wondering about our mysterious French scientist and this is borne of that curiousity. Enjoy, more should come~

“What will happen to her?”  
The bearded man shoots.  
And Delphine knows pain, her legs turning to nothing beneath her as she struggles to stay conscious and breathing. The bullet hole through her abdomen burns. Who knew a simple piece of metal could cause so much pain?  
He raises the gun again, and Delphine meets its one-eyed glare.  
She is not afraid.

Delphine’s first kiss was illicit, secret, hidden where the other girls could not see.  
She was smaller, then, and cleaner too; the memories are tainted with envy for what she used to be, for what she could have been, what she should have been. But the love was still present- faded and worn like an old jumper, but still there.   
Her first kiss had been her first everything; for a short time, Danielle had been her entire world.  
The teachers had laughed about their relationship- how close they were, how they shadowed one another everywhere.  
The others had been jealous- they were beautiful, they had the teachers eating out of the palms of their hands, they had had everything for a few, short, wonderful months.  
Their relationship was hesitant, both girls unwilling to push the other too far, but it was something good, something worth the effort. Delphine had often dreamed of a future where Danielle had been healthy, where they weren’t afraid to be what they were.  
Unfortunately, nothing good lasts forever, despite Delphine’s fervent wish for it to defy the principle she had taken to heart for so much of her life.  
Danielle was simply holding Delphine’s hand as they revised on her bed- for an end-of-unit assessment on the circulatory system.   
Delphine remembered that moment vividly, reliving it every time she closed her eyes for too many years. Their happiness had lasted several months, illicit happiness that reminded Delphine of the feeling of mouthfuls of wine stolen from her papa’s glass when he wasn’t looking.   
Caution had deserted her as she leaned forward to press a gentle, chaste kiss to Danielle’s lips.  
Then everything went to pieces- pieces with jagged edges that still cut and hurt a decade later.   
A gasp.  
A malicious laugh.  
Whispers behind their backs, twisted smiles like knife edges and eyes that shone with knowledge that could, and would, ruin them.  
Through it all, Danielle had stood strong, unbending, unbroken, a refuge of strength.  
Delphine hadn’t.  
She ended it, seeing the tears in her loved one’s eyes (so much like Cosima’s had been a decade later), the tiny tremors that wracked Danielle’s small body, and the pale pink spots on a white handkerchief dropped on the floor.  
What if became the soundtrack to Delphine’s life afterward, echoing in her dreams.   
What if she hadn’t been weak?   
What if she hadn’t been caught up in the moment, hadn’t ruined it all?  
Her papa heard of it soon enough.   
Arguments behind closed doors, raised voices.  
Monsieur Fournier, Maman, her teachers.

A hasty move for Delphine back to Lille, ostensibly for her to be home-schooled.  
A diagnosis of lung disease for Danielle.

From then, they wore grief like a shroud, identical in the hopeless list of their mouths, the dullness of their eyes. Both withdrew, Delphine giving up ballet, Danielle giving up painting. Both smoked now, typical French teenagers in an artsy film, smoke filling their lungs with heat like happiness, at least for a moment.   
Their depression only grew, their parents and teachers bastions of misunderstanding, their former peers taunting and hating and jeering.   
One day, their similarity grew, they became eerie mirrors of each other, though mirrors in a twisted sense, like those in a circus that make you seem different to how you really are.   
Doors were locked.  
The hot tap gushed.  
Warm condensation beaded on mirrors and skin while fingers, slightly sweaty from the humidity grasp a cold metal lifeline.  
Clothes puddled on the floor, like they had been so many times before, then neatly folded and placed carefully on the toilet seat.   
Quiet hisses as bare flesh met the heat of the water, blood rushing to the surface and turning the skin pink like boiled lobster-flesh.   
“Je t’aime.”   
Lines drawn up their arms, straight as if they had used a ruler, unwavering, red lines in the sand between them and the others.   
Heads fell back against the bath’s rim.  
An eternity of nothing had greeted them, like when Delphine had fainted because of hypoglycemia, or when Danielle had collapsed after having to run up to her English class.  
Then, the sterile white or a hospital, the steady beeping and antiseptic smell, familiar to both. Delphine had visited the hospital for her father, bringing him his lunch if he had forgotten it, or watching him work with the determination to be him one day. Danielle knew the hospital more intimately, knowing the cold, hard beds, the machines, from days spent here trying to tame the cysts lurking in her body.  
Nurses flocked at their bedsides, like harried birds, flapping, squawking, so much like brightly coloured parrots but for their plain white hospital scrubs.  
And the bald man, with eyes of cold steel, was always there, like a spectre of death, watching, waiting. Danielle had called out to him whilst sedated once, mistaking him for death itself.   
She wasn’t quite wrong.  
Delphine saw her papa greet him with familiarity, murmuring a greeting in broken English (despite his mother being French-Quebecois and fluent in the language, Doctor Cormier had not spoken English for a long time). She thought him good, someone who would save her from the slump she was in.  
Danielle knew him as an omen of her oncoming doom.  
Doctor Aldous Leekie would speak in fluent French, a Canadian accent colouring some of the words and he spoke of DYAD.   
To Delphine, he waxed lyrical of DYAD’s opportunities for her, of opportunities to become someone of great renown. The comparison to himself went unsaid.  
To Danielle, Delphine had imagined, he offered her respite, cutting edge treatment to cure her of the disease that Delphine knew would claim her sisters’ lives as well.  
Both accepted.  
And Delphine watched her old friend, her old lover, progressively become worse through glass windows, watched the treatments that only stopped the disease for what seemed like a second. Jennifer had not been her first experience of the clone disease. She hadn’t lied but it still felt like one, every time she looked at Cosima and the imagined bloodstains on her lips.  
Delphine had many regrets, but none of them was that she never loved the clones like she was asked.


End file.
